#Searx

Searx App for KaiOS: First version released!

We're proud to announce that we've finished our first mobile app and it's a search app made for feature phones running #KaiOS and released under AGPL 3.0.
It makes use of the SearxAPI which is also free and open source software and can be used on many public servers.#Searx can ask many big search engines which can be selected by the user in the background anonymously and combines them into one big results page.
Some people may not know what KaiOS is so here is a short summary:

KaiOS is a operating system for smart feature phones like the Nokia 8110 or the JioPhone.
Phones with KaiOS have WiFi and the ability to install and run apps but they have keys instead of a touchscreen.
KaiOS is based on the abandoned #FirefoxOS open source project and all of its native apps are written in HTML, CSS and Javascript.
That makes it easy to write apps for it - You only need #Palemoon or an older #Firefox version and a USB cable to make your apps run on the phone.

The reason why we chose Searx as backend is quite simple: It offers a public API without the need to register for a token and without being dependent on a single provider.
As long as we don't experience a outage of the whole internet, that should make our app fail-safe.
To give users as much freedom as possible, you have full control over the Searx instances you want to use - You can select one out of currently five from our list or add other instances and delete predefined ones.
We try to offer as much customization opportunities as possible:

You can select the language you want to get results in

You can select the source of the autocomplete (or turn it off)

You can select the mode for safe search (off/moderate/strict)

You can select the search engines you want to use in the different categories

The app is able to search in all categories offered by the Searx API.
Image search allows you to easily download images from the results by pressing the left button.
Like always we try to offer our software in as many languages as possible - Currently only English and German but help in translating is always welcome.
You can translate the project on our Pootle instance or by forking the project and submitting a properties file using a pull request.
The source code of the app is available on NotABug.
There is no information website about the app currently and there is no Mastodon project account.
If you have feature requests or bug reports, please use the NotABug issues or comment on this blog post.
Currently the app is not available in the official KaiOS Appstore because their seems to be a bug at their publishing platform but you can install is manually by downloading the ZIP from NotABug and installing it using WebIDE (Palemoon/Firefox).